Ambient Awareness or Ignorant Bliss?
Web-based social networking services have definitely proven to be a resourceful way for people with common interests, activities, and backgrounds to stay connected across political, economic, and geographic borders. Ambient awareness is a newer form of social awareness that involves constant contact with one’s friends and colleagues through the use of these platforms. Through micro-blogging, users post frequent, brief messages about everyday personal activities. There are both positive and negative aspects of these inventive behaviors. Clive Thompson is a popular blogger and a science and technology writer who has some great points regarding ambient awareness in his article, “I’m So Totally, Digitally, Close to You. On page 174, he mentions how impersonal we become by communicating continuously in this way. He says, “…it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships.” On any given social media site, the average person could follow newsfeeds, posts, or conversations of hundreds of contacts. The accessibility in itself causes us to become emotionally lazy. Why drive across town to see someone when we don’t have to disrupt even a moment of our lives to see how someone is doing? These technologies allow your social circle to become vast. This causes them to become addicting and overused, leading to broken relationships because the people are so caught up on the technological aspect that they ignore the more important face-to-face interactions. Thompson states on page 173, “…deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.” While ambient awareness may disturb the fluidity of some relationships, it may take others to new heights. Kevin Clarke writes about technology for a variety of publications. On page 167 of his essay, “Tweet Like an Egyptian”, he says, “It was not just that they used the Internet to get their message out to the rest of the world and to inspire like-minded protests in other nations.” This article discusses the role of Internet in the freedom campaigns and protests in Arab countries. The people who joined the revolution in Egypt and Tunisia organized themselves and established authority by using the latest social networking technologies of the Internet. It is also through the World Wide Web, that they learned how important it is to have their opinions and thoughts fully expressed and welcomed. Ambient awareness has connected the world in ways we could have only dreamed of years ago. Reading the news from around the world may give us a glimpse into the lives of people thousands of miles away, but it is the expression of thoughts and feelings that allows us to feel like we are in the experience we are reading about. This opens the door to creating a completely different kind of awareness within ourselves…the awareness that anything is possible. The confidence that is needed to make changes in our own lives can be more fully gained from knowing that someone else has experienced or is experiencing the same thing. Ambient awareness has both positive and negative effects and it is a personal choice as to whether or not we participate. To some, expressing every thought and detail of the day may seem pointless. After all, these “fads” are consuming the lives of people around the world. But, like any other technology we are given, how we choose to implement these platforms is completely up to us. Though the mundane thoughts and actions we post daily may never start a revolution or cause any global changes, the opportunity to inspire someone else is now at our fingertips. If this idea excites or empowers you the way it does me, the only question to ask is what will YOU Tweet about today?